On Portlaoise’s Main Street, the Aussie Rules player sticks out like Uluru against the landscape. The beard is all scrag, levelling out a good inch under the point of his chin. The full-arm tattoo peeks out from under his left sleeve. Even in baggy clothes, the broad frame says think again, pal.
Zach Tuohy left here four years ago, more or less to the day in fact. The Town won their third Laois county title on the spin that October and tidied up the first round of the Leinster Club a week later. Before November arrived, Tuohy was in Melbourne. New country, new sport, new identity.
Four years on, the conversion is just about complete. He signed a new three-year deal with Carlton in June and in the meantime has started out on the road to dual citizenship. He has a kid on the way, due in January, and he’ll be house hunting when he gets back to Australia.
He has his girlfriend Becca home with him, treating her to a first taste of the town where he grew up.
“She’s bored already,” he smiles.
“Hey!” she protests. “No I’m not! It’s nice. I come from a small town too, you know.”
How small?
"Well, it has 100,000 people I guess. But still . . ."
Two worlds
Two worlds. One up here, the other down there. A life concerned with the gradual shift from one to the other. If and when there's next an International Rules series in Ireland, his here will be down and his there will be up. A visitor in his own land.
Tuohy didn’t exactly plan for it to go this way. When he left in 2009, it never occurred to him it might be for good. The pull of home was too strong.
Still is, to some extent. He got back last Saturday and the first order of business was to go down to the club for the team meeting ahead of their county semi-final against Arles-Kilcruise. The next day, he togged out and sat on the bench. When they line up for the county final against Arles Killeen tomorrow week, he’ll do the same.
He won’t play, not with the first Test on Saturday night and the second a week later. But he has in the past – two years ago he came on in the county semi-final and started the final.
And for as long as he’s up to it and for as long as they’ll have him, he plans to keep pitching up in the future.
“It kills me just to watch them,” he says. “I can’t cope. I’d almost rather not watch it at all. I don’t know, I just get too on edge watching them. It takes years off me. I don’t know how people watch teams they care about.
“Playing is different. If you’re playing in a tight game, you don’t get nervous, you don’t think about it. But watching it, you heart’s in your throat. I can’t deal with it. I’d still rather be sitting in the dug-out with the gear on than in the stands wearing jeans and a T-shirt.”
The ties don’t snap that easily. The October after he left, the club lost Peter McNulty to suicide. The 25-year-old forward had been there for all of Tuohy’s best days in a Portlaoise jersey and it was beyond unimaginable he’d have to come back within a year for his funeral.
For two seasons afterwards, he wrote “CM” on his wrist tape before every game.
"I did it for two years and I stopped this year. I stopped purely because I thought it was time to move on. The nature of life is that as time goes on, more people close to you will eventually pass away and I kind of thought, 'Where do you stop?' I'd have initials halfway up my arm eventually.
Depth of feeling
"There's still a depth of feeling there in the club. All of our training gear has his nickname on our shoulder. It lingers, especially because of how he died. The circumstances of his death makes it that little bit worse."
Portlaoise’s three-in-a-row became six-in-a-row over time and they’re 1/6 to make it seven next Sunday. They usually keep him a medal for his dad to pick up at the dinner dance at Christmas and in 2009 they kept him a Leinster medal on top of the county one.
“I actually didn’t want it. I genuinely didn’t. I never really got homesick but the year they won the Leinster Club was the first year I was away and that was the hardest pill to swallow ever. I hadn’t been gone long at all, maybe only a few weeks altogether.
“I still haven’t watched it and I won’t watch it either. I’m delighted they won but it would bring me to tears having to watch them win it. I can’t cope with it. It was just pure jealousy. That’s all it was. Delighted as I was, it was just too hard.”
Still, you’d imagine Carlton would have something to say about him suiting up each year he comes home, no?
“Nah. They understand that we give up a lot to go out there. They do get it. They know what we’ve left behind. As far as I know, just about every Irish player that’s gone out to play in the AFL has come back and played with their clubs in the off-season. So it’s not a secret or anything.
“But they do get what a big deal your club is. I wouldn’t say they encourage us. But we never get given out to for coming back to the club. It’s never going to change either so they sort of have to get used to it.”
For one reason and another, Tuohy is the only AFL player in the Irish squad – although the young Louth forward Ciarán Byrne is about to strike out along his road as he joins up with Carlton once the series is done.
He played in the series two years ago and enjoyed it, more so for the fact his Irish team-mates were having the time of their lives on tour than for the games themselves.
With the Aussie team so off the pace that their own coach filleted them in public for being unfit, it was all a bit too one-sided to be satisfying.
“It’s not that big a deal over there,” he says. “It doesn’t get the same publicity, there’s really no hype about it. It’s an all indigenous team playing us this time so it’ll be a bit different.
“The team they put out against us two years ago wasn’t the best it could have been so there’s bound to be an improvement this time.
“It’s a weird game, really. I enjoy playing it. I never really expected to get near an Ireland team basically. Growing up watching the series, I would always have watched it but then when I got to 17, it looked like it was going to be scrapped altogether because of all the fights. So now that I have the chance, it’ll be good to get going.”
And when it’s all done, it’ll be back to his other life. Or is this his other life? As the years roll by, it gets harder and harder to tell.
